Good bye freedoms

[ItDepends]

Looks like I'll be moving to Canada soon, home of the brave (edit: and free).

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/07/21....ap/index.html

[midas06]

that's pretty pathetic by the courts

[Bailey]

I live in Canada.. : )

[Xianti]

The courts dictating how parents should care for their sick child? Or how one should care for his own health? And penalizing them for not being drones that just go along with Western "medicine," much of which is designed and forced upon the public by multi-billion dollar pharmaceuticals and government-sanctioned "medical" research?

That's fucked up.

[Greedo017]

we have a duty to protect children from neglegent parents.

silly old western "medicine" can cure his disease ~85% of the time. eating overpriced trendy vegetables and infomercial vitamins can't. i know a whole hell of a lot about cancer: it is ridiculous to think diet will make it go away. adults can and do kill themselves all the time desperately believing it will, but he is a child.

[SonOfAkira]

we have a duty to protect children from neglegent parents.

silly old western "medicine" can cure his disease ~85% of the time. eating overpriced trendy vegetables and infomercial vitamins can't. i know a whole hell of a lot about cancer: it is ridiculous to think diet will make it go away. adults can and do kill themselves all the time desperately believing it will, but he is a child.

Greed, we've been on different sides of some political discussions, a left and right wing divide, but I can't agree with you more on this one.
It's obviously a sticky situation, but I'm inclined to believe that a parent has a responsibility to explore every possible avenue in helping their sick child.
Just the way it is phrased confesses that this is the most misguided plan ever with no knowledge of actual human biology.
A 'sugar-free' diet?!?!?!?
A quick biology lesson:
Your muscles, brain, and the majority of your organs are fueled by glycogen, which comes from glucose, which is essentially pure sugar. Every thing you eat, your body will try it's hardest to turn into glucose, even protein and fat. All complex carbohydrates are combinations of various sugar molecules. Starch = Amylose and maltose. Maltodextrin = maltose and dextrose. And there are enzymes in you body that convert them into glucose , i.e. amylase, maltase, lactase, et cetera.
There is little difference, and absolutely none when it comes to stopping cancer, between getting your glucose requirements from fructose or starch or plain table sugar. I don't know what herbs they have in mind, but the sugar-free cliche discredits the whole thing. Green tea extract is not going to cut it.
On another note, with all the millions of people who have no access to health coverage in the states and are dying from lack of it, I find it insulting that somebody would thumb their nose at potentially life-saving treatment.

[ItDepends]

we have a duty to protect children from neglegent parents.

silly old western "medicine" can cure his disease ~85% of the time. eating overpriced trendy vegetables and infomercial vitamins can't. i know a whole hell of a lot about cancer: it is ridiculous to think diet will make it go away. adults can and do kill themselves all the time desperately believing it will, but he is a child.

I won't really go into a discussion here, but "Western medicine" is a huge scam in general to pump money to rich people. Anything that they can't make large ammounts of money on they will discard, no matter how great it is.

This is well worth the time of reading it.

http://www.rense.com/general31/rife.htm

[ItDepends]

Maybe not in this case, but something as simple as diet could cure a majority of the health problems we see in america. Do not brush it off in favor of some fancy designer drugs.

Edit: That's what I get for not reading a link i post

[Greedo017]

Edit: Here is a link I found. I haven't read all of it, but it has a lot of total shit. http://www.cancertutor.com/

i'm not going to try to refute all of this, despite how easy it would be to do, it would just be too time consuming. the bottom line is, you are an adult, and if you want to trust cancertutor to determine your future, i hope you never get cancer.

[Greedo017]

did you read the page describing the author of that webpage? pwned.

"About R. Webster Kehr
Webster Kehr was born on October 7, 1946 in Jefferson City, Missouri (USA). He is married to the former Marit Olaug Liset (Norway). Marit is a seamstress and works at a bridal shop. They have 7 children, 12 grandchildren and are expecting their 13th and 14th grandchildren!! They live on 6 acres in eastern Kansas.

Webster is an ex-Marine (i.e. U.S. Marine Corps) and Viet Nam veteran. After the military he served for two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Their web site: www.mormon.org). After his mission he graduated twice from Brigham Young University, first in mathematics, then in accounting.

Webster has been the Vice President-Finance of an insurance company and the Vice President-Project Manager of a market research company. Currently, he works for Northrop Grumman as a contractor for the U.S. Army at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.

Webster is the author of the online physics book: The Detection of Ether, which can be found at:
Physics Book

Webster is also the author of many physics and mathematics papers, but none of them has been published because the journals are controlled by the physics and mathematics establishments, which fiercely resist progress, especially when the truth is not what they want to hear.

It turns out that Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and his photon theory are both false. Webster's book proves both of these things. Two of his mathematics papers are also on the above web site. His most current mathematics papers are not online because of copyright issues. Webster is also an expert on evolution and considers the theory of evolution to be mathematical nonsense."


but no. i'm sure a group of some of the most educated people in the country are involved in a massive conspiracy to kill us all, r. webster kehr says so.

[ItDepends]

did you read the page describing the author of that webpage? pwned.

"About R. Webster Kehr
Webster Kehr was born on October 7, 1946 in Jefferson City, Missouri (USA). He is married to the former Marit Olaug Liset (Norway). Marit is a seamstress and works at a bridal shop. They have 7 children, 12 grandchildren and are expecting their 13th and 14th grandchildren!! They live on 6 acres in eastern Kansas.

Webster is an ex-Marine (i.e. U.S. Marine Corps) and Viet Nam veteran. After the military he served for two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Their web site: www.mormon.org). After his mission he graduated twice from Brigham Young University, first in mathematics, then in accounting.

Webster has been the Vice President-Finance of an insurance company and the Vice President-Project Manager of a market research company. Currently, he works for Northrop Grumman as a contractor for the U.S. Army at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.

Webster is the author of the online physics book: The Detection of Ether, which can be found at:
Physics Book

Webster is also the author of many physics and mathematics papers, but none of them has been published because the journals are controlled by the physics and mathematics establishments, which fiercely resist progress, especially when the truth is not what they want to hear.

It turns out that Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and his photon theory are both false. Webster's book proves both of these things. Two of his mathematics papers are also on the above web site. His most current mathematics papers are not online because of copyright issues. Webster is also an expert on evolution and considers the theory of evolution to be mathematical nonsense."


but no. i'm sure a group of some of the most educated people in the country are involved in a massive conspiracy to kill us all, r. webster kehr says so.

http://www.rense.com/general31/rife.htm
http://www.rense.com/general31/rife.htm
http://www.rense.com/general31/rife.htm

[ItDepends]

did you read the page describing the author of that webpage? pwned.

"About R. Webster Kehr
Webster Kehr was born on October 7, 1946 in Jefferson City, Missouri (USA). He is married to the former Marit Olaug Liset (Norway). Marit is a seamstress and works at a bridal shop. They have 7 children, 12 grandchildren and are expecting their 13th and 14th grandchildren!! They live on 6 acres in eastern Kansas.

Webster is an ex-Marine (i.e. U.S. Marine Corps) and Viet Nam veteran. After the military he served for two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Their web site: www.mormon.org). After his mission he graduated twice from Brigham Young University, first in mathematics, then in accounting.

Webster has been the Vice President-Finance of an insurance company and the Vice President-Project Manager of a market research company. Currently, he works for Northrop Grumman as a contractor for the U.S. Army at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.

Webster is the author of the online physics book: The Detection of Ether, which can be found at:
Physics Book

Webster is also the author of many physics and mathematics papers, but none of them has been published because the journals are controlled by the physics and mathematics establishments, which fiercely resist progress, especially when the truth is not what they want to hear.

It turns out that Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and his photon theory are both false. Webster's book proves both of these things. Two of his mathematics papers are also on the above web site. His most current mathematics papers are not online because of copyright issues. Webster is also an expert on evolution and considers the theory of evolution to be mathematical nonsense."


but no. i'm sure a group of some of the most educated people in the country are involved in a massive conspiracy to kill us all, r. webster kehr says so.

And you are missing the fucking point of this thread.

[Greedo017]

sorry if i came off sounding like a dick or anything, i edit my posts a lot, i was toning down/shortening my posts when you replied. and, sorry if i overreacted or anything, i take some things very personally about this topic.


i get what your point was with the thread, but the kid's life can be saved with conventional medicine. Allowing him to pursue alternative medicine is tantamount to allowing suicide. i realize there are a lot of different freedoms involved here, but we do force minor's to do many things, it is not open and shut that this shouldn't be one of them.

i find it easy to go off on a tangent about people who do pursue alternative medicine because I find it tragic that so many people are duped into ruining what might be the end of their life with dreams of miracles, and they avoid helpful medicine in the process.

[a500lbgorilla]

This is terrible.

I want to be a judge so I can make ludicrious rulings.

[thenonsequitur]

we have a duty to protect children from neglegent parents.

silly old western "medicine" can cure his disease ~85% of the time. eating overpriced trendy vegetables and infomercial vitamins can't. i know a whole hell of a lot about cancer: it is ridiculous to think diet will make it go away. adults can and do kill themselves all the time desperately believing it will, but he is a child.

I can't disagree more.

I have personal problems with both of the statements you made above.

1) Let's start with the first one "we have a duty to protect children from neglegent parents". I'm not going to go into too many details, but when I was 6 years old, I and two of my siblings were taken away from my parents by child protective services becaue of "negligence". For the record, my parents were perfect parents and neither neglectful nor abusive. Part of the reason child protective services labeled them negligent had to do with the fact that we were home-schooled at the time and they were saying my parents were negligent of our education.

Despite the fact that we were all clearly two to four years ahead of the school system in all subjects for kids our age, they didn't budge. My parents went into serious debt attempting legal battles to get us back (debt that got so serious they eventually had to go bankrupt and that poor credit fucked over our quality of life for the ten years that it took to get it removed from their record). After they basically ran out of money, it took two years and a rich friend of my parents suing all four organizations involved--the state government, federal government, FBI, and child protective services--to get the record straight and get us back (and my parents won a nice sum of money for damages caused by these organizations--at least the justice system isn't totally fucked up). We were in foster homes for those two years. The government basically abducted three normal kids from good parents for an extended period of time on false premises. My parents later wrote a book about the shitty problems with the child protective services system, but no publisher would publish it because it was "too controvertial". Way to go, publishing compaines. Let a serious violation of our personal freedom go unnoticed because you don't like controversy.

2) Now for number two. "silly old western "medicine" can cure his disease ~85% of the time. eating overpriced trendy vegetables and infomercial vitamins can't." Overpriced trendy vegetables and infomercial vitamins are just as profit-driven as western medicine. Neither group (as a whole)--western doctors or makers of trendy diet substances--cares about the health of individuals. Both basically care about getting rich as fast as possible.

Now eating actual healthy food and vegetables (as opposed to "overpriced trendy vegetables") and the right supplements to deal with the problem at hand (as opposed to "infomercial vitamins") will actually deal with many health problems.

I know this first hand. A few years ago I spent over a thousand dollars in doctor fees in attempt to fix a chronic digestive ailment I had developed. I'm still in my early twenties, so something like this is not common. So the doctors basically all said the same thing, something like "I have no idea what's wrong with you, now give me $300 and we'll call it a day". A few of them prescribed me medicine that made me seriously sick. One of them prescribed me a drug that landed me in the emergency room for serious heart palpitations caused by the drug. After that in addition to the digestive problem I also continued to have strange and scary heart problems and serious back pain. Neither went away after I stopped using the drug. I reported back to several doctors about these new problems, and they basically said the same thing--"I have no idea what's wrong, now give me $300."

Anyway, I did some reading and found out that diet could be my problem. I stopped eating all cheese and started eating more fiber. That fixed most of the digestive problems, but the heart and back pain were still there. The I went to a chiropractor for the back pain. His adjustments didn't do much, but he did have an idea about what was causing the back pain and heart problems. He said it kind of looked like a deficiency of Omega-3, probable caused by the particular medication given to me for the digestive problem. He recommended that I start taking Omega-3 supplements. A couple weeks of this, and the problems were completely gone.

I'm now perfectly healthy due entirely to diet change and supplements.

And I also want to highlight the fact that while chirpractors are generally only fringe-accepted in western medicine, it was western medicine that actually CAUSED a serious health problem for me without fixing the problem that it was designed for, and and it was a chiropractor that figured out both the problem and and solution after one visit (for only $35 I might add, constrasted to the 3-digit figures of "regular" doctors), when several visits to several different doctors of traditional western medicine basically said we have no fucking clue what's wrong, and then charged a shitload. Those huge doctor fees put me into a sticky debt situation too. Thanks to poker, I was actual able to deal with a lot of this debt faster than I expected to.

Anyway, cancer is different than the problem I had. But that's not to say it doesn't have a symtom relief method that doesn't involve blasting damaging radiation throughout the body or other western methods of attempting to deal with the cancer or dealing with the symptoms. In any case, it is DEFINITELY NOT the government's place to say what health methods do and do not work, and there is certainly no case for declaring a parent to be negligent simply because they are pursuing so-called "alternative" health methods. This is true regardless, but especially true if they already tried a western-medicine route (as did the parents in the article above) and all it did was make the patient weaker than before.

IMO it is a serious violation of personal freedoms to declare these parents neglegent.

I apologize for the long-winded rant but I have more serious opinions about these two paricular topics than almost any other topics in existence.

[bode]

Edit: Here is a link I found. I haven't read all of it, but it has a lot of total shit. http://www.cancertutor.com/

i'm not going to try to refute all of this, despite how easy it would be to do, it would just be too time consuming. the bottom line is, you are an adult, and if you want to trust cancertutor to determine your future, i hope you never get cancer.

this is all total bullshit. dont believe everything you read ItDepends. if you are going to preach about every website you come across like this i feel incredibly sorry for you.

[ItDepends]

Edit: Here is a link I found. I haven't read all of it, but it has a lot of total shit. http://www.cancertutor.com/

i'm not going to try to refute all of this, despite how easy it would be to do, it would just be too time consuming. the bottom line is, you are an adult, and if you want to trust cancertutor to determine your future, i hope you never get cancer.

this is all total bullshit. dont believe everything you read ItDepends. if you are going to preach about every website you come across like this i feel incredibly sorry for you.

Oh my god i already edited that post because this is not the point of the thread

[bode]

sorry

[Bmxicle]

I can see legislating that someone's parents must tell their child to take some life saving medication that has little in the way of side effects, but radiation therapy is different in that it basically almost kills the body while killing the cancer. Its not as if it magically cures cancer, it just increases survival rates while causing a great deal of pain to the patient. It isn't the governments place to try to force the parents to force their 16 year old child to use that treatment when there are alternatives (that may or may not be any good) available.

[Gareth]

It is so good living in a free country.

I would hate to live in a country where as adults we can't make our own decisions.

note: we need a sarcastic smiley

[mcatdog]

This principle can be illustrated by using an intense musical note to shatter a wine glass: the molecules of the glass are already oscillating at some harmonic (multiple) of that musical note; they are in resonance with it. Because everything else has a different resonant frequency, nothing but the glass is destroyed. There are literally hundreds of trillions of different resonant frequencies, and every species and molecule has its very own.

This quote is from the article that ItDepends posted. It makes no sense to me. There's a huge difference between a species and a molecule. Yes, each molecule does have a resonant frequency, but an organism is made up of billions of different molecules, and furthermore, different organisms are mostly composed of the same molecules, simply in different proportions (for example, a different sequence of amino acids in the DNA polymer). There doesn't seem to be any way that one frequency could "destroy" one organism but leave all others unharmed.

Hopefully someone who knows more about biology and physics will clarify this for me but it seems like this guy is just a quack, which is too bad because I agreed with a lot of the points that author was making at the beginning of his article, it would be a shame if he was a fraud.

[gabe]

fwiw, the hospital is being 'ordered' to get treatments is really really awesome, i spent a week there a few years ago.

[samsonite2100]

Is modern medicine always the "right" answer? No, of course not--as in Non Sequitur's example, certain ailments are better treated holistically, w/ dietary changes or whatever. Is aggressive non-hodgkin's lymphoma best treated like this? No.

"Starchild's" parents are clearly fruitcakes and are endangering his life. I hardly see how the court stepping in in this instance qualifies for the title "Goodbye Freedoms."

[Greedo017]

non-sequitor.

perhaps in your parents case, you were taken away wrongly. that doesn't mean we don't have a duty to protect kids from neglegent parents.

digestive problems are not cancer. doesn't it make a lot more sense that what you eat will directly affect your digestive problems, but not cancer? Medicines probably did give you those side effects which could be helped by diet, but that doesn't mean chemotherapy doesn't cure cancer, or show that diet does.

taking chemotherapy and getting radiation treatment sucks. but he is almost certainly not terminal, and most everyone who gets cancer does take it and they manage to suck it up, so i don't think it is so bad that we should let a child kill himself over it. its tough, him being 16. he deserves a lot of freedom an adult would have. i don't know if its right for the judge to do it or not, but I don't know everything that's involved here.

[jackvance]

That Rife story was a nice read, but nothing more than that probably.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rife

[thenonsequitur]

perhaps in your parents case, you were taken away wrongly. that doesn't mean we don't have a duty to protect kids from neglegent parents.

Nor was I saying that we don't have that duty. I have a personal example where they seriously fucked up, and mine is not an isolated anomoly. Just pointing out that the child protective services in this country is a messed up system, and very well could be in this case too (and IMO it is).

digestive problems are not cancer. doesn't it make a lot more sense that what you eat will directly affect your digestive problems, but not cancer? Medicines probably did give you those side effects which could be helped by diet, but that doesn't mean chemotherapy doesn't cure cancer, or show that diet does.

You're absolutely correct. Again, I wasn't trying to make a direct correlation here, just some (very) loose comparisons. Just giving an example of where dietery changes fixed a problem where western medicine failed miserably, and also an example of where western medicine had a side effect that was worse than the condition to begin with. I agree that my example isn't great because it was for a digestive ailment.

But the alteration of my diet also made me feel better in a number of unrelated ways too; I just generally felt much healthier, and I also never get colds anymore since I made this dietary change, so it's clearly good for my immune system.

A good immune system is probably good for cancer too. So whether or not this guy ends up taking a western approach to this problem, it's probably a good idea for him to be eating healthy foods and taking vitamin supplements. Also importantly, chemotherapy is very harmful to so many tissues in the body that a case can be made against it. So it's not completely invalid to say no to that treatment. Also, while chemotherapy might extend lifespan, I've heard reports that living with the side-effects of chemo can be as bad or worse than living with the effects of cancer.

But above all what matters IMO is that people be allowed to weigh valid factors like these on their own without the intervention of the government. That was the point of this thread to begin with, and I strongly support the position that this case is a violation of personal freedoms.

If there were less of a case against chemotherapy then I think the government would have a stronger case for parental neglect.

And FWIW, I agree with you that the case gets stickier because the the kid is 16. While probably not legally relevent (it might be, but I don't know much about law), I think if the kid were 8 instead of 16 the government would also have a stronger case. A 16 year kid is more likely to have thought through this himself rather than just mindlessly listening to what his parents say like an 8 year old might. But as I said, I don't think that's very legally relevent because a dependent minor of any age is still a dependent minor.